Benchmarking and analysis of KPI’s against best practices is critical to the success of any internal service delivery organization. Almost every other organization has some sort of KPI’s of some sort in place to measure and monitor performance. Metrics management is also key skills to successful Solution Delivery role.

Six Sigma advocates three levels of metrics: business level metrics, operations level metrics and process metrics. Some of the metrics Six Sigma suggests are here.

Business Level Metrics

These metrics are typically financial and operational summaries for shareholders and management. Balanced scorecards is widely used for business level metrics. IT can be viewed either as a cost center or a profit center in companies. Based on this financial management for solution delivery is responsible for:

Estimating costs of projects accurately working with vendors, where necessary

Inputs Project scope management is one of the key knowledge areas addressed by PMP. Its also a key skills for successful solution delivery.

Key Stakeholders involved in the scoping activities include:

Project Sponsor / Executive

Business Process Owner and SME for business area

IT Management supporting this business area

Project Scope Management of PMP includes processes to ensure that all and only the work required by the project is done on any project. The key processes for this area in PMP are:

Scope Planning

Scope Definition

Creating Work Breakdown Structure / Product Breakdown Structure

Scope Verification

Scope Control

Scope Planning

Elaborate ,formal and time consuming scope planning activities are often necessary for critical projects. Decisions on scope are typically documented in a scope management plan. This plan contains information on:

How the project scope will be defined

Define a WBS from Project Scope

How the scope will be verified

How the scope will be kept in control

Scope Definition

Scope definition and decomposition involve the activities to size the proposed project so that estimates can be made of costs, resources requirements and project duration. This phase builds on the initial Project Scope statement. Assumptions, constraints on the project are elaborated in this phase. Dependencies of the project are identified and documented. The output of this phase is a Project Scope Document which typically has:

Business objectives and high level requirements

Strategic alignment describing how the initiative fits with organizational direction or mission.

Project Description: Characteristics of the product/service being developed.

Project Objectives : Key success criteria which include time/cost constraints, quality targets etc. Each objective can have a metric like dollars for cost.

Project Boundaries: Including context diagrams to provide a visual model of the scope of the project

Project Deliverables

Initial constraints, assumptions, dependencies and risks

Project team organization

Important Project Milestones

Initial cost and time estimates

Project Configuration management details

Creating a WBS/PBS

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), is a decomposition of work that is required to complete a project to accomplish the business objectives. It is typically deliverable-oriented and hierarchical in nature. The WBS describes the total scope of the project work to be performed. A Product Breakdown Structure (PBS)
is a decomposition of the components of the product. The PBS describes the total scope of the product or service to be delivered.

Creation of a WBS(or PBS) is the next step after completion of a Project Scope Document. In this phase deliverables are divided into manageable components of work until deliverables until they are defined into a work package level. Cost and schedule should be reliably estimated from work packages.

In day-to-day life people manage expectations at work,friendships and family. Management is about managing expectations too. You manage expectations of you boss and you set expectations of your staff.

Success of any project/initiative depends active expectation management of stakeholders. The way stakeholders interact with IT services reflects their expectations on what IT can or cannot deliver.

Expectations change over time.Proactive expectation management is about staying in tune with the changes in stakeholder expectations.Stakeholders with negative and unreasonable expectations may need special attention.

For projects, requirements, budgets, timeline are typically the explicitly stated expectations. Implicitly stated objectives could include career goals for team involved etc.

In business, an operating unit is either making money or it’s detracting from a company’s profits. In simple terms, it’s the difference between a profit center and a cost center.

Conceptually, a business unit is considered a profit center when “it’s set up as a small business — it has its own revenue and profit targets,”

On the flip side, a company unit such as the human resources department doesn’t earn revenue or turn a profit. Its objective is to hire, train and support the company’s employees, and there’s a cost to the company to run the unit. As such, human resources is typically viewed as a cost center.

IT departments traditionally were set up as cost centers. An IT organization would charge back costs to a business unit. For example, IT would charge a commercial loan division of a bank for monthly transaction processing costs or mainframe use costs. But it wouldn’t bring in a profit because the division would be charged at cost. In some cases, those costs may be absorbed by the company or as part of a business unit’s overhead.

If an IT department is a cost center, “the rest of the business views you as a burden”

However, it’s common for IT organizations to be set up as cost centers in highly-regulated industries, such as financial services or electric utilities, “to show regulators where the costs are” by charging IT costs to individual business units

Other companies, such as The Hartford Financial Services Group in Hartford, Conn., have elected to set up their IT organizations as profit centers with a goal of generating zero profit

Some CIOs think their IT departments should remain cost centers. “Our core competency [in IT] is to help our company build aircraft structures, not to code [enterprise resource planning] systems, so I could not see us as a profit center”

The work in the Solution Planning Phase begins with the definition of functional and technical requirements and performance targets that lead to activities that address the design and integration of the elements defined in the Scope document.

The overall design process is iterative; teams will continuously revisit
their designs in order to resolve integration issues and tune the overall capability to meet all business, functional, and technical requirements.

The information gathered during this phase focuses on building out the detailed requirements and design as defined by the business requirements outlined in the Scope document created during the Envisioning Phase.

Tasks /Activities
• Update Scope document (as needed)
• Update Risk Mitigation plan with any new risks
• Update Project Plan for those activities that will take place during the
Developing Phase

During the stabilizing phase these activities take center stage, as bug finding and fixing become the primary focus.

Here the focus of testing shifts from coverage testing (which measures
whether individual pieces or features of the application work) to usage testing (which measures whether the application as a whole woks as intended).